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[theremotedr]

I would like some advice if i may.
I have a new site but traffic is now very slow.
I am looking for suggestions & advice on how to implement them.
Here is the site in question http://www.theremotedoctor.co.uk/index.html
I think the navigation on using the site is the problem.
The headings along the top of the site does not stand out or attract peoples attention enough to click on them,i believe this to be the issue.

I was thinking of flashing text but not sure how to incorporate it into the site code but open to any advice.

Thanks.

[theremotedr]

Using the search button pulls up this option for me http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex10/neontext.htm
Top right of my web page is where i would like to add it but having issues trying to do it correctly.
Please can you assist with the correct placement,i end up with the script being shown as opposed to the scrolling text ?

[Beverleyh]

Your post is unclear and seems to touch on several factors. If you could define your questions more specifically and/or define them in concise statements, you'll probably find that a google search helps answer your questions.

Possible search suggestions;

1. How do I drive traffic to my website? / How to increase/generate website traffic

2. How do I encourage return website visits? / How to retain website visitors

3. How do I make my website easier to navigate? / How to improve website navigation/usability / Best practise website navigation patterns

If you have a specific question following your research, please feel free to ask again, in precise terms.

[traq]

Using the search button pulls up this option for me http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex10/neontext.htm
Top right of my web page is where i would like to add it but having issues trying to do it correctly.
Please can you assist with the correct placement,i end up with the script being shown as opposed to the scrolling text ?

You would need to share your code (and, preferably, a link to your page (or, use an online service like jsfiddle to create a test case)) if you expect any help with this.

Edit: sorry! I didn't see the URL in you original post. It looks like you got the script positioned properly(?)

[djr33]

1. "traffic is now very slow" suggests that it is relatively slow. Your business is very specific, so you can't compare it to more popular topics like web design or cars. You'd have to start by checking just how many people are even interested in remote repairs. To be honest, I'd start by assuming it's fairly low. While your goal should of course be more traffic, remember you're not looking just for numbers but for a specific audience. For a specialty business like yours, specialty advertising might be an idea-- for example, getting your business card in with new remote purchases somewhere would be immensely more helpful than people randomly searching for you on Google.

2. Would people know to look for you? Are you relying on people who specifically are searching for people who can fix remotes? Or are you expecting a more general audience that would then be aware of you for future needs? I can't see how the latter option is likely. People are usually lazy and, you must admit, on a daily basis aren't very interested in remote repairs-- but it's crucial to them when they want one repaired!
Here's a big problem-- you have competition:
https://www.google.com/search?q=remote+repairs+uk
That's what a potential customer will do. They'll search for some generic term like that and see what happens.
The only good strategy for your website as a website would be to try to get it to the top of that list. But you'll be in competition with (presumably on-average equally capable) other companies and also with the many "do it yourself" websites.

3. Your current design is already busy. I very strongly suggest: do not make it more busy or add flashing text! A website should be inviting, not exciting. I would, for example, change the strong blue color to something that makes the website a little calmer and easier to read. There are very rare exceptions when white text is better than black text. Design is important, but the focus of your site shouldn't be the design-- less design is often a better design. To be clear, your site isn't particularly bad. There are plenty of much worse websites on the eyes (animated gifs, flashing text, bright pink, etc.), but I'd still recommend toning it down just a bit. The "pure" primary colors are usually a bad idea-- remove the strong blue and the strong red. Replace them with a pale but still colorful version. And make the text white.

4. The body of the page is what bothered me a bit. The header is actually just fine, so I'd keep it that way. The navigation is fine. I don't think the navigation on your website really matters. Of course it shouldn't be confusing, but beyond that it won't be the main impression. There's a big difference between a hit and a customer-- the difference is that a customer stays around to use the website longer. There are lots of statistics out there about people making a decision about a website within the first second or so. Make their eyes happy, and focus on their initial impression, then presenting the necessary information. If you can get them to read through the website, you've basically done your job. One way to check this would be to add a (hidden!) counter on your pages to see how many hits you get only on the first page and then how many people look at anything else. You (like most websites) probably lose a huge percentage of visitors on the first page only. The most important resource for an online business is attention, and it's hard to retain!

5. In my personal opinion, your site is cute but doesn't scream "reliable business" on first impression. You might think about a way to balance the cuteness with something that looks obviously professional, "above the fold" on the main page. A nice banner (alongside your graphic) might help, if it wasn't too busy looking and included some photos of the products you sell. But that's just one idea. Be creative.

6. I said above that a lot of your competition for web searches will be "do it yourself" sites (and youtube videos!). This might actually be a strategic possibility for you-- take advantage of that market. Add a page with some nice tips and tricks for people that they can do for free (or even with a special part/kit that you sell-- but include some free ones too). At the moment there's absolutely no point in visiting your site unless: 1) someone is an active customer, or 2) they just love remotes enough to wonder about you as a person (unlikely!). So you are currently limited to only people who both happen upon your website and also want to buy a remote. You can attract a much more general audience by adding in some additional content-- I think the "do it yourself" approach would be great. I'd suggest a page on that, and also perhaps a personal blog about some of what you do (if it's possible to keep that interesting). More than this, some "do it yourself" videos on youtube could be hugely helpful and provide you with free advertising on a popular website.

7. The actual buying process is not very clear, not especially professional looking, and should be more immediately obvious on the first page. I'll discuss these points separately:
i) Your site is not designed for people to hang out and read (consider Amazon.com's main page!!). Move the existing text down and add some kind of obvious and clear link to "BUY STUFF NOW", however you want to phrase that. I would suggest a secondary navigation system (not replacing what you have) where it will help them identify the product they're looking for immediately-- their attention is limited, so make it a one click process to begin the purchasing process. Again, consider some major online stores and look at how quickly the user navigates to the purchase. A dropdown select menu would be one option for that first item on the main page, or something similar (a customized purchase-determiner, interactive flash object wouldn't be the worst idea, if not overdone).
ii) You should generally make the process from searching through purchasing guided and very clear. As a first step, I suggest separating your navigation menu into sections so that you have website sections (eg, "contact me") as their own set of links and the links to individual product sections in a different area or different color. This could be as simple as changing the area for the product links from blue to red, keeping the other links blue. That will stand out visually and make it clear to the user that they make purchases that way.
iii) Your cute name and cute logo are great and an asset, but the overall website shouldn't feel like a personal website. Why would they buy from a person rather than a company? Make it clear that you're a company by adding in more obvious ways to buy products. While PayPal is easy and much better than the hassle of dealing with credit card purchases online, it looks very unprofessional that this is your primary means of payment. It's good to have PayPal (I like using PayPal even for things like airline tickets-- my info is already there and it's faster than the very annoying process of entering all of my credit card info), but you should have a professional looking checkout page that has other options too. At the very least, a business that only allows purchases via contact me is unprofessional (possibly even laughable). Don't take that the wrong way from me-- that's probably what some of your customers are thinking. "Is this guy selling these remotes out of his garage?" And even if you care, your website doesn't need to project that. As for the contact form itself, I don't like that: 1) it's an entirely new experience (why the new layout? are they on a new website?), 2) it asks that they give you information about which search engine they used (this suggests your business needs their help, not reassuring), and 3) that it has a CAPTCHA. Unless you are offering someone a service they'll go out of their way for (eg, signing up to a free forum) or your business is large enough that you can afford to turn away customers (eg, one of the big companies), make it as easy as possible to contact you and buy your products. If you get some spam along the way, just delete it. There are certain unintrustive CAPTCHAs (eg, Javascript-based) that would make less work for your customer but still stop the least intelligent (and most frequent) automated bot attacks. Other than that, I'd suggest it's worth your time to manually delete spam emails to be sure you don't miss real ones-- you can balance that over time to see if you actually are wasting so much time with spam that you'd rather lose a few customers here and there-- perhaps that's more reasonable in some circumstances. And you could look at some other way to filter your email for spam, such that the customer doesn't ever see it.

But just to clarify my suggestions: DO NOT overwhelm them with "BUY THIS" and "CHEAP CHEAP" across the whole page. That's annoying. Just make it clear that they can quickly find what they need and easily buy it from you.

8. Your navigation menu should allow clicking on the top keyword. It should not be required that they must first open the menu then navigate down just to get to the main link. For example, I should be able to click on "contact me" directly and go there. No need to hover on "contact me" then move my mouse down to click on "contact me" to actually get there. (It's also confusing that this causes the viewer to jump to the top of the current page rather than going to your contact page!) A menu should extend basic links and navigation, not replace them.


Just a general disclaimer: these comments are meant to be helpful and direct. I hope it helps.

Also, it's not a bad site. But you need more out of it. So it's your job to make your website more appealing to customers-- it's already functional, and someone can use it if they want to, but you now need to make them want to.

[theremotedr]

Good valid points mentioned above.

1, I originaly had one web page before & everything was shown on that one page,i decided to make that page a little more professional but since doing that buisness is down quite a bit.
2, I rely on people using search engines to find me and to be honest a few of my pages are towards the top in the results.I also sell on Ebay & with each purchase the customer receives a business card.Like i mentioned above business was good on the old original site.
3, Do you have a html colour in mind for the background,and i will edit ALL the text to white.
4, A hidden hit counter is a good option if some code could be supplied & help advised etc.
7, This is the buying process.
Make your selection along the top bar say "Fobs & Cases"
Then make your second selection say "2 Button complete fob"
The item is shown complete with cost & postage details.
The contact me that you now see is for the customer to click "now taken to form" and supply me there name,email,etc.I would then send them an email to confirm stock & any questions to be answered.
I agree on your search engine field & capatcha,so i will delete them.
Do you think from start to finish for a purchase its long winded ?

[djr33]

1, I originaly had one web page before & everything was shown on that one page,i decided to make that page a little more professional but since doing that buisness is down quite a bit.

New websites usually drop in hits but then will go up if they're better. Having multiple pages is probably good in the end, but it might go down for a bit.
Do you have a new address, or just new pages? A new address would especially drop the hits.
The new pages might lose visitors who end up at the wrong one, but that should probably work itself out. You can also set the right meta keywords and description (on each page independently) to help with that.

2, I rely on people using search engines to find me and to be honest a few of my pages are towards the top in the results.

That's good. If you think you're getting enough people seeing your site, then I emphasize more that you should focus on retaining visitors rather than having them just go somewhere else-- that's hard to do but important.

I also sell on Ebay & with each purchase the customer receives a business card.Like i mentioned above business was good on the old original site.

That's good for retention, but I was referring to people who don't know you exist. Real-world advertising (eg, a 50% off coupon) with some purchase somewhere else (you fix remotes in addition to selling new ones, right?) might help. If not, that's fine. But for something specialized like this, the reality is that a web presence might not be enough-- I think it's likely that only a fraction of people who need removes go searching online for them! They might go to a big name like Amazon, and they'd probably go to the company or store where they bought the device. So you'll inherently limited by that, unless you can otherwise advertise off-line!

3, Do you have a html colour in mind for the background,and i will edit ALL the text to white.

Sorry, I meant to suggest changing all of it to black text. I might have made a typo above.
I'd suggest light blue (and light red, etc.) for the background colors. Perhaps a dark blue outline with a light blue background. You should also focus more on accents than on full colors-- look at Yahoo.com to see a very purple website, but still with 90% white backgrounds. You could also use a non-black (but still dark) text color to bring in a little color. For example, blue outlines and accents plus blue text. That might work.
As for an HTML color, just see what looks best to you. I'd start with something like #9999FF and see how that works, adjusting as needed.
Again, note that I'm suggesting this only for the body of the webpage, not for the top menu. That's fine now (but add visual differentiation for the product links).

4, A hidden hit counter is a good option if some code could be supplied & help advised etc.

You could install some kind of monitoring software on your server (perhaps something comes free with your host) to track stats. There are a few packages available, but you won't have permission to install them (usually) on a free server, so see what the host has to offer. Other options like Google Analytics can help too.
Your website is inherently limited by using plain HTML pages. If you had the ability to switch over to something like PHP, you could do a lot more with it including tracking page views, using a database, even adding user accounts. But you'd have to decide if that's worth it to you. Once you've switched your site over to PHP, a page load counter is really easy, and plenty of information/tutorials/scripts are available. For the record, "switching" to PHP involves nothing more than changing all of your pages to ".php" (and adding relevant PHP code as you desire)-- there isn't anything else to it. A valid HTML page is already a valid PHP page. PHP just allows extra features to be added too. You could also easily add a referrer tracker so you know where (most of-- it isn't 100% reliable) your visitors come from including search engines. So anyway, it's up to you. It's more work, but perhaps for more gain.

7, This is the buying process.
Make your selection along the top bar say "Fobs & Cases"
Then make your second selection say "2 Button complete fob"
The item is shown complete with cost & postage details.
The contact me that you now see is for the customer to click "now taken to form" and supply me there name,email,etc.I would then send them an email to confirm stock & any questions to be answered.
Do you think from start to finish for a purchase its long winded ?

None of that is necessarily "wrong" or "bad", but anything takes too long-- customers get bored very easily. Every way you can make it faster will help.
And yes, I actually would say that's too slow, compared to other companies. Here's why:
1. That method is easy for you or for a return customer, but a first time visitor to your website needs to get familiar with it first and figure out that the products are hidden behind those dropdowns at the top. On many websites those are used for things like "go to my account" or "recent updates" or "new products", but not for the only way to get to the products (also see my comment about adding a new way to find products, in my last post). So it's not too slow if they know where to find the products, but it's not entirely clear yet: the number one goal of your website should be directing (but not by annoying) your customers to find and purchase products. As I said, making that panel red instead of blue would be a good start.
2. The problem is your "contact me" and paypal checkout. This is what the customer will think: "...but on a real website I can just pick my product and click on checkout and pay and get a confirmation email in my inbox in 30 seconds... I have to wait for this??" Sure, some people are patient. But the average customer isn't. Having an actual online store would drastically improve your site-- at the moment you have an online catalog, not a store-- you need to fill the orders manually and reply by email. This is another aspect that would be helped by a dynamic site such as with PHP, if you could make it yourself.
A really good option for you would be to look into 3rd party online stores. Usually most webhosts can offer one for a fee, but for a business the fee is usually affordable. I'd strongly suggest looking into that. If you want to compete with the large websites, you must have comparable services including immediate purchases. If you don't, you'll be forever limited to the specialty market with individuals who have the time and patience, which might be acceptable for you. Being a specialty retailer isn't a bad thing, but it's smaller.


The bottom line: having a successful business website requires not being good, but being better and not being useful, but being easier (and perhaps more useful). Look at the websites of your competition (both big stores and other specialty stores) and ask yourself realistically whether your website is better, not just whether it's also sufficient. In my opinion you have some changes to make, but you can get there.

[theremotedr]

1. New address and new pages BUT look here http://www.ianparsons.info/audikeypage.htm so to keep customers informed etc of the new site.
2, I advertise my stock as some is in stock and some out of stock but can obtain it,i advise the customer.
I cant only advertise stock that i have as this site is a second income alongside Ebay and is doing ok but the drop off in sales at the moment is standing out.
I am making edits as we type,uk tim 00.25

[djr33]

1. New address and new pages BUT look here http://www.ianparsons.info/audikeypage.htm so to keep customers informed etc of the new site.

Ok, that's not surprising then. Give it some time. Search engines will need to catch up to the change, and that's certainly what's happening. Return customers will go to the new site. I would suggest adding "We've moved." to that page so it's clear it's not just some new website, but the new version of the same website.

Also, it is possible to use a 301 redirect which is a "permanent redirect" for moved pages. It will automatically transfer people to the new page and it will also transfer (most of) your search engine ratings-- it's the only way to immediately retain search engine ratings with a new site/address. That will mean effectively deleting the old page and replacing it with the new one, which I'd assume is acceptable for you. It will also require server access-- is that hosted by a friend or is that your personal site? Either way, if you can add a .htaccess file (or some similar equivalent) to send the 301 redirection header to the browsers, then you'll be set.

Additionally, it looks like the old site was specifically for Audi, which is more limited than your current site but might actually do better for search engines because it is specific. It is possible that fewer people are searching for "replacement remote" than for "replacement audi remote" (or other brands). Be aware of that, and this is why I said your sub-pages on the new website are also important.

2, I advertise my stock as some is in stock and some out of stock but can obtain it,i advise the customer.

Customers would be upset if you are out of stock and don't tell them, but I don't think that in itself will be relevant (or helpful) for the general customer. I mean, you'd need more than that to attract and retain customers. That's a good thing, just not central to a positive aspect (rather, avoiding a negative one).

I cant only advertise stock that i have as this site is a second income alongside Ebay and is doing ok but the drop off in sales at the moment is standing out.

Ok, that's fine, but I'm not sure I see how this is relevant.
One option for this is to use a database and dynamic pages via PHP (or another serverside language) that would allow you to more easily maintain your items.
In short, there's nothing wrong with this, but I don't see how that specifically helps you get more customers. If anything, I'd suggest maintaining at least brand-level pages with "sorry, sold out at the moment" for search engine purposes.

[theremotedr]

Its 01.50 in the uk so off to bed.
Ive made a few changes and will continue tomorow.
I need some help as to where i need to change the white text to black on the following pages as i cant seem to find ite.
http://www.theremotedoctor.co.uk/index.html
http://www.theremotedoctor.co.uk/radiocode.html

Also on the home page do you think the following logos should stay the same colour or change them to a white background with black text ?
FACEBOOK
BUISNESS SELLER
PAYPAL